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RECENT HISTORY: TO WHAT 

EXTENT TO THE EXCLUSION 

OF OTHER HISTORY 



BY 



MILLEDGE L. BONHAM, Jr. 



Rephinted from the Proceedings of the 

MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL 

ASSOCIATION, Volume VIII 



3 



^-3 
36 



RECENT HISTORY: TO WHAT EXTENT TO THE 
EXCLUSION OF OTHER HISTORY? 

By Milledge L. Bonham Je. 

This topic suggests a conversation I had some years 
ago in the Virginia State Library with a high-school 
pupil. 

"What are you doing here, Henry?" I asked. 

''I am collecting data for my graduation essay." 

''What is your subject?" 

In all seriousness, he replied, "The Human Race." 

My topic, then, needs to be defined. What is meant 
by ' ' recent history ' ' — the nineteenth and twentieth cen- 
turies? European history since the Industrial Revolu- 
tion? Since 1900? Since the outbreak of the present 
war? And where is the "exclusion" to occur — in the 
high school or the college? In the curriculum or the 
course ? Naturally the type of institution, the size of the 
history department, the library facilities, and the like 
will affect all of these questions. For the purposes of 
this paper, I shall include in the term "recent history" 
everything since the Franco-Prussian War. I shall 
glance briefly at the questions of exclusion from both 
course and curriculum, in both high school and college. 
Since history, like Henry, has for its subject the human 
race, I must endeavor to be equally liberal. 

It is a truism that no subject is entitled to a place 
in the curriculum unless it does two things, namely, gives 
useful information and supplies mental training. His- 
tory, properly taught, does both of these, but its proper 
teaching depends largely upon the facts selected for 
presentation. To tell this audience in what way history 






308 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

supplies useful information would be superfluous and 
impertinent, but we cannot too often and too strongly 
emphasize the fact that the most useful historical data 
are those which explain existing institutions. Such 
data are valuable in direct ratio to their recency, as a 
general rule. Of course the origins of many of the present 
institutions may be traced through medieval history to 
the ancient world, but the most important contributions 
have been comparatively recent. To illustrate from the 
domain of economic history, the United States, in her 
brief life has issued about half as many patents as all 
other nations combined. Since, then, the recent contribu- 
tions to civilization are generally the most important, 
they should be stressed in our history courses; usually 
they are not. 

So far as I know, the plan I shall propose is not in 
use, in its entirety anywhere, though I have no doubt all 
of its various items may be found in one place or another. 
Tradition, the demands of other departments, lack of 
texts, lack of journals, lack of time, 3,11 the familiar argu- 
ments will be urged against it, so I am merely putting 
it forward as a scheme which I should like to see tried, 
and hope some time to try myself. 

As far as the high school is concerned, the history 
courses are pretty well fixed, and seem likely to remain 
so for a while. We cannot expect to make any radical 
changes in the curriculum, so we shall have to try to mod- 
ify somewhat the content of the courses. If the Report 
of the Committee of Seven be followed as a whole, even 
the content of the courses cannot be altered very much, 
but frequent opportunities will appear for contact with 
recent history. For example, in the course in ancient 
history, compare the desert march of Xenophon's Ten 
Thousand with the recent Turkish attack on the Suez 
Canal; compare the purpose, construction, and effects 
of the Nile-Red Sea Canal with those of the Panama 



ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 309 

Canal; oompare the economic and political causes of the 
Punic Wars with those of the present struggle. Nat- 
urally, the course in medieval history will offer more such 
opportunities, and that in modern history still more. It 
seems to me that in the year assigned to the period since 
800, instead of devoting approximately half the session 
to the Middle Ages, about one-fourth would be sufficient, 
if the time were spent on those features of medieval civi- 
lization that have had important effects on present-day 
society, such as the Church, the Empire, etc., while by 
contrasting the economic and social life of that day with 
that of today the work might be vitalized. In the words 
of Principal Nelson of Salem, Oregon : 

The pupil who begins to study what is going on around him 
finds that most of it is intelhgible in the light of what has gone 
before, and will realize for himself that only by the study of the 
past can we understand the present. Most of us could without 
appreciable injury introduce more of the inductive method into 
our teaching of history. We begin at the wrong end and take 
too long in getting from the remote past down to the living pres- 
ent, of which the pupil is himself a part. Most of us have ex- 
perienced the sudden vitalizing of historical facts that has come 
to us when we have stood on a battlefield or before a great his- 
torical monument; but we too often treat our pupils as if the 
mere textbook could be trusted to arouse the same absorbing 
interest.^ 

If, as suggested, one-fourth of the session be given 
to medieval history treated as I propose, another fourth 
should be sufficient to bring us down to the French Eevo- 
lution. The rest of the year, that is, about a half session, 
could then be devoted to the last century and a half, with 
the accent on the half. Similarly, in the course in Eng- 
lish history, most of the time should be put upon the part 
since the accession of Henry VII, every occasion being 
seized to connect the events therein with analogous or re- 
sultant ones of today; for instance, the Penal Code of 

^History Teacher's Magazine, VI, 85. 



310 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

William III and the Ulsterite opposition to Home Rule ; 
the Instrument of Government of 1653 and the Parlia- 
ment Act of 1911. Events since the occupation of Egypt 
should be studied in more detail and their results noted 
more carefully. 

Time could be saved in American history by paying 
little attention to the details and military events of the 
various wars, but rather stressing their causes and re- 
sults. Two of the best and most recent secondary-school 
texts in American history give about one-fourth of their 
space to wars, although these wars occupy only about 
one-ninth of the time covered by the books. In one case 
more space is given to the Civil War than to all others 
combined, yet these texts are far superior to some of 
their immediate predecessors, in which as much space 
was given to the Civil War as to all the rest of our his- 
tory! Since distinguished historians and scholars like 
Hart and Van Tyne cannot agree on the merits of Se- 
cession, it seems futile to attempt to get it settled by 
high-school students. Jackson's Valley Campaign was a 
wonderful piece of strategy, but its economic, social, and 
political effects are not very apparent today. Such 
phases might well be omitted almost entirely. Fidelity 
to principle as illustrated by the soldiers and civilians 
of both sides, the economic, social, and political effects of 
the four-year struggle are the things to dwell upon, and 
it might be profitably noted that emancipation is the lin- 
eal ancestor of the Jim Crow laws. The military aspects 
of the Spanish-American War seem trivial when com- 
pared with the fate of Belgium, or the strategj^ of von 
Hindenberg and Grand Duke Nicholas; but a considera- 
tion of the attitude of the Filipinos towards us after 
seventeen years of American rule might throw a valuable 
light on the question of intervention in Mexico. The 
time saved by omitting such things as military and other 
nonessential occurrences could profitably be spent on 



ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 311 

such things as tracing the evolution of the Sherman Act 
and connecting it with the Clayton Act and the Federal 
Trade Commission. Likewise, Balboa's discovery, ro- 
mantic and interesting as it is of itself, can be made of 
personal moment to our pupils if we show the connection 
between Balboa and Goethals. 

Where, as in Louisiana, the suggestions of the Com- 
mittee of Five are followed, and only three years of his- 
tory given in the high school, the same suggestions would 
apply, mutatis mutandis. 

So much for the high school. When we turn to the 
colleges, we find that most of them require a course in 
medieval and modern history as a prerequisite for all 
other history courses, and frequently this is all the his- 
tory positively demanded of college students. Hence our 
first problem is with the amount of recent history to be 
included in such a course and how to get it there. Per- 
sonally, I have never been able to find a satisfactory text 
for the freshman course, and doubt my own ability to 
write one. What I should like to do, is to spend about 
three weeks on the contributions of ancient society to 
modern civilization, emphasizing such items as Greek art 
and philosophy, Hebrew religion, Egyptian science, Phoe- 
nician commerce, and Roman law. Next, might be treat- 
ed the Germanic invasions, the Church, feudalism, the 
Empire, with some attention to the economic and cultural 
features of medieval society. Little time need be spent 
on the events of the Crusades, the Hundred Years ' War, 
the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles; slur the events and 
dwell on causes and effects. In this way the Eenaissance 
could be reached before the end of the first term. After 
a brief consideration of the Protestant Revolt as partly 
one effect of the Renaissance, with emphasis on the 
causes, leaders, and results, we could then turn to ex- 
ploration and discovery as another effect of the Renais- 
sance, including, of course, the other factors which ne- 



312 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

cessitated the expansion of Europe. Most of the second 
term could be devoted to the last century and a half, and 
all through the year, as was suggested for the high-school 
courses, the connections with current civilization should 
be insisted on. This assumes, what is usually true, that 
the introductory course is the only one required in his- 
tory ; a corollary of which is that many students take no 
other course in that subject. Therefore, if they are not 
made to see the functioning of past institutions in the 
present, in that initial course, they stand an excellent 
chance of never realizing it. A colleague of mine once 
asked a student, **What influence had Rousseau on cur- 
rent educational practice ? " * ' None, professor, Eousseau 
is dead. ' ' We are all familiar with that tendency of the 
student to interpret Longfellow's injunction as to the 
self-interment of the defunct hitherto to mean that all 
history is dead, and unless we can connect it with his own 
interests, we run the risk of his dropping history after 
the first year. Connect the past with the present by 
means of recent history and we stand a better chance of 
increasing the number of those who continue history. 
''We have found," says Mr. Chadwick, of Gary, Indiana, 
''that if the work can be made of social value, the inter- 
est of the pupils is enlarged, and the greater the interest, 
the greater is the incentive to work, and to do better 
work. If a pupil is led to see that his work will be of 
value to his parents and to other men and women that he 
knows, then his desire to do good work is kindled. " ^ If 
Mr. Chadwick be correct (and I submit that he is) a 
priori, I should say that the more recent history the stu- 
dent gets, the more potential value will he perceive in the 
subject. This will tend to make him elect other courses 
in history and pursue them more zealously. 

Where more than one year of history is required of 
college students, certainly more time should be devoted 

2 History Teacher's Magazine, VI, 112. 



ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 313 

to modem history, and of the modern period the last fifty 
years should get the most attention. If two years is re- 
quired, I should devote one to European history from 
ancient times to about the Industrial or the French Rev- 
olution, treated as I have suggested. The second year, 
one term could be given to Europe since 1815 and the 
other to American history since 1876. The first year 
would serve the purpose of laying a foundation for the 
second and of giving the desired background for the 
courses in literature, philosophy, politics, etc. Of the 
term spent on European history, one-third might be de- 
voted to the period of revolt and unification, the rest to 
the events of the last forty-five years or so. 

It is desirable that electives be offered in recent his- 
tory, but the number and nature of these courses will de- 
pend largely on the organization of the history depart- 
ment in each institution. The question of exclusion 
scarcely comes in here, as only other electives would be 
excluded and they might, of course, be offered in alter- 
nate years. 

From the foregoing it must not be supposed that I 
am opposed to having a considerable amount of remote 
history in the curriculum. On the contrary, I recently 
said that we need more ancient history at Louisiana State 
Universitj^ Courses in remote history, as those in re- 
cent history, might be offered as electives, and the plan 
already in use in some colleges might be extended. That 
is, cooperation with other departments where there are 
instructors qualified to give the desired courses. These 
should be so ordered that they might be accredited to 
either department, and this would tend to attract many 
desirable students who would not otherwise elect history. 
A similar effect would no doubt be felt by the other de- 
partments. For example, a course might be offered in 
Roman History, which could be counted either as Latin 
or as Histoiy. If the former, much if not most of the 



314 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

parallel reading should be done in Latin sources, pre- 
scribed by that department, and vice versa. Whether 
the professor of history or the professor of Latin should 
give such a course would depend on local conditions. The 
same plan could be used for a course in nineteenth-cen- 
tury Europe, to be coordinated with the courses in com- 
parative politics, in economic history, in French, Span- 
ish, English, and Italian history and the corresponding 
literatures. No doubt, in many cases this plan would not 
be feasible, but in others it would, and w^ould, I think, 
have the highly desirable result of bringing about a better 
coordination between different departments, as well as 
arousing the interest of students. 

But since there is little probability of the complete 
adoption of ray scheme, let me say a word more about 
recent history in connection with other courses. My col- 
league. Doctor Fleming, gives a course entitled ''The Civ- 
il War and Reconstruction. ' ' We should naturally expect 
an authority in that period to be rather bigoted as to its 
importance and apt to dwell overmuch on it, especially 
when he is the head of the department. The contrary is 
true in this case. Professor Fleming treats this period 
from the viewpoint of national development, tracing the 
various factors, personal, economic, and sectional which 
made for Secession, together with the results of the en- 
suing decades. By passing over nonessentials, he saves 
enough time to trace the effects of this period down to 
the present, concluding his course with a study of Beard's 
text on contemporary American history. In other words, 
he includes "recent history" in "other history" rather 
than excludes other history to make room for recent. 

A student in political science asked me recently if 
any engagement of the Revolution took place on Louisi- 
ana soil. (In passing let me explain that I do not give 
the course in Louisiana history; the above-mentioned 
colleague has it.) When I suggested that the student go 



ANCIENT HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 315 

to the statehouse and read the tablet commemorating 
the capture, in 1779, of the British post at Baton Eouge, 
by the American and Spanish allies, she was dumf ounded. 
This merely illustrates the general neglect of local his- 
tory in our schools and colleges. However, that ques- 
tion was suggested by the celebration of the centenary 
of the battle of New Orleans. It is doubtless imprac- 
ticable to offer separate courses in local history, but a 
considerable amount may be taught by dovetailing it with 
more general courses. The more recent the topics treat- 
ed, the greater likelihood that the students will be inter- 
ested. Having aroused their interest, we can lead it back 
along the lines of institutional development. The part 
that biography would play in such a course is obvious, so 
I will illustrate from the field of political history. The 
Louisiana Supreme Court has recently decided a long- 
contested appointment of a state-bank examiner. Taking 
that as the point of departure, I found it comparatively 
easy to arouse the interest of some of my students in the 
origin of national banks, proceeding by way of the Fed- 
eral Reserve Act. Apply the same method on a broader 
scale, ever widening the student's horizon, by connecting 
local and recent occurrences with those more distant in 
time and place, and you stand an excellent chance of 
really vivifying his work. Suppose the recent McManus 
indemnity be taken for example ; we can compare the kill- 
ing of McManus with the destruction of the Maine, with 
the pretext for the Mexican War, with the war of Jen- 
kin's Ear, and a dozen others, and they may, in turn, be 
correlated with each other. Again, the dedication by Wil- 
son and Taft of the Red Cross Building may be used not 
merely to introduce the women of the Civil War, but also 
Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. The phi- 
losophy of the whole matter is contained in a saying of 
Dr. J. W. Nicholson, the beloved dean of our college of 
arts and sciences — ''An ounce of illustration is worth a 



316 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

pound of explanation. ' ' If that be true — and it is — 
evidently the more recent the illustration, the more com- 
prehensible it will be, ceteris paribus; and the more com- 
prehensible, the more efficacious. 

Assuredly, we must not ignore the fact that our view 
of recent history is likely to be astigmatic, perhaps 
biased, and many of our data will not be based on docu- 
ments. But Professor Muzzey is right in saying : 

For all the gingerly caution of historians not to come so 
close to the present as to spoil their perspective, we find very lit- 
tle evidence that remoteness in time from the events chronicled 
lends any great probability of agreement on either facts or the 
interpretation of facts. There is as much controversy over 
Julius Caesar today among Roman historians as there is over 
Roosevelt among modem politicians. As for the credibility of 
our facts in past history, there is little reason to think that they 
were selected or recorded with as much faithfulness and ac- 
curacy as are the facts of the present. There is scarcely an his- 
torical event recorded, whose credibility has not sometime and 
somewhere been called in question.^ 

This simply means that we must be careful, when 
teaching recent history, to inculcate open-mindedness. 
Personally, I agree with Gathany that : 

The further back we go in history, the fewer big things do 
we find that have a bearing on the present world of thought and 
action. Such things should receive serious and intensive study. 
Thus content would be put into those things worth while, and it 
would be rather difficult to forget them. Put in another way, 
this process of elimination means that considerably less time 
would be given to pre-nineteenth century European and Amer- 
ican history, and much more time given to the study of history 
from the nineteenth century to the present day, the last twenty 
years of European and American history receiving considerable 
attention.^ 

Too many students are apt to get the idea of the old 

3 History Teacher's Magazine, III, 27, 28. 
* History Teacher's Magazine, V, 225. 



ANCIENT fflSTORY AND OTHER HISTORY 317 

professor in one of Richard Harding Davis ' stories, that 
no event which had occurred within his own recollection 
was historic. Instead of realizing that the more recent 
and personal an event, the more likely is it to be germane 
to their lives, such people fall into the error of which 
Henry Sydnor Harrison's "Queed" was accused by 
''Sharlee.'' You recall that on the memorable evening 
when he went to discuss with her his discharge from the 
Post, she said : 

You are a failure as a sociologist for the reason that you 
are wholly out of relation to life . , . You know absolutely 
nothing about human society except what other men have found 
out and written down in textbooks. You say you are an evolu- 
tionary sociologist. Yet a wonderful demonstration of social 
evolution is going on all around you, and you don't even know 
it . . . On the one side there is the old slaveholding aristocracy ; 
on the other, the finest democracy in the world; and here and 
now human society is evolving from the one thing to the other. 
A real sociologist would be absorbed in watching this marvelous 
process; social evolution actually surprised in her workshop. 
But you — I doubt if you even knew it was going on. A tre- 
mendous social drama is being acted out under your very win- 
dow and you yawn and piUl down the hUndl 

I hope there is no danger of any history teacher's 
making the same ghastly mistake. There is little differ- 
ence of opinion, I presume, as to the desirability and ne- 
cessity of teaching that phase of recent history known as 
current events, or contemporary history. There is room, 
however, for disagreement as to whether such work 
should be done daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly; 
whether in class or out, by recitation or by report, by 
assigned topics or by the student's own selection; in a 
certain class or in all classes. Preferably, it should be 
done in all history classes, as frequently as practicable 
and by various methods. This is not the time for a dis- 
cussion of these methods, which are well treated with re- 
gard to the high school by Nelson, in the article I have 



318 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

quoted above, in the History Teacher's Magazine for 
March, 1915, and by Gathany in the number for Novem- 
ber, 1914. In the same journal for February, 1910, Dr. 
Hayes discusses the question from the standpoint of the 
university. The ''laboratory of history" which he there 
describes is of course out of the reach of most of us, but 
the parable of the talents will apply here also. 

To summarize, in conclusion: By recent history, I 
mean the last fifty years, especially the last fifteen. This 
I would stress at the expense of the nonessentials in other 
periods. In all classes, high school and college, I would 
seek to vitalize the past by bringing the events studied 
into the closest possible touch with the lives of the stu- 
dents, particularly by comparing remote occurrences 
with recent and familiar ones. 



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